College football scheduling on ESPN: ‘It’s a giant puzzle’

BRISTOL, Conn. — By our count, there are three dozen live college football telecasts available Saturday to Capital Region viewers.

Of those, 14 are on the ESPN “family of networks” — ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and even ESPNews — and others will be produced by ESPN for distribution on other outlets.

Trying to sift through the masses of inventory and decide what games should be played when and on which network is a chore not taken lightly by the Bristol-based folks who do that.

“You may see things that are head-scratchers from time to time,” said Burke Magnus, senior vice president of programming, college sports, for ESPN, “but there’s always a reason behind it. It might be because we’ve run out of a certain team late or a certain team early. It’s a giant puzzle that takes a long time to draw.”

Indeed, ESPN does determine the starting times for most of the games it televises, bound by contractual stipulations. The network even arranges some of the nonconference matchups, based on partnerships with schools that are seeking to fill schedules.

“We’re managing a slew of contracts with all of our partners, and none are the same,” said Kurt Dargis, director of programming and acquisitions for ESPN. “There are nuances to each of them. Some we can do whatever we want with as far as start times go. Others we have to pre-create them when the season begins with appearance maximums and minimums.

“Our goal every year going into the season is to have ratings up on all our networks. When selections are announced, they may not make sense on the surface, but there’s reasoning behind any decision we make.”

Although there are numerous networks that carry college football — CBS, NBC, Fox, and their cable subsidiaries, and others — none has the inventory of ESPN.

The network owns pieces, and in most cases large ones, of every automatic-qualifier BCS conference. ESPN has first-tier rights to Big Ten, ACC and American Athletic Conference (the former Big East). It shares first-tier rights to the Pac-12 and Big 12 with Fox. CBS has first-tier rights to the SEC, but ESPN has all other rights, including creation of the SEC Network, to launch next fall.

There are so many games under the ESPN roof that the network has sub-licensed games to others. For instance, ESPN recently sold a batch of AAC games to the CBS Sports Network.

“The major conference acquisition process has become a more comprehensive endeavor,” Magnus said. “We look to all the rights to something, and if we can’t, dial back from there. If we do acquire all the rights to something, we really have no problem looking for opportunities to sell content to other networks, if we have that right. Some conferences don’t want it done that way and wouldn’t approve of such a relationship.”

The large inventory and America’s seemingly insatiable appetite for football has enabled ESPN — and now other networks — to successfully move games to weeknights.

After some initial resistance, schools now recognize that a Thursday night game in front of a national audience affords more exposure than a Saturday game can get in any time slot.

“The Pac-12 was smart,” Magnus said. “They instituted a conference policy that requires schools to host Thursday and Friday games on a regular rotation. It’s not an optional thing for their membership. They instituted it as a conference rule that their ADs (athletic directors) and presidents all approved.”

As a result, ESPN scheduled 59 weeknight games this year, including the potential college football game of the year on Thursday, Nov. 7, when No. 2 Oregon plays at No. 5 Stanford.

“We have some input on matchups we’d like to see,” Dargis said of the mid-week games. “We don’t always get the ones we like. Once those matchups are determined, there’s a process that we and Fox go through together to determine who gets what games.

“Gradually over the years there’s more buy-in to Thursday games, for sure by schools that never would have done it when we started this, and Fridays, as well. We started doing Friday games back in 2004, 2005, we were pulling teeth to get that done. All the people had worries about how it would affect high school football attendance on Friday nights. We put our research guys after it, and they were able to show on nights we were doing football games, high school attendance wasn’t going down anywhere, TV usage wasn’t going up at all. We’ve seen buy-ins (by the colleges) on Fridays, as well.”

Even with that, there are still 36 games available Saturday. Happy clicking.

1 CBS surprised some folks this week, announcing that Clark Kellogg and Greg Anthony will swap roles on the network’s college basketball coverage. Anthony will become the lead game analyst, working with Jim Nantz, and Kellogg will move into the studio with host Greg Gumbel It has to be considered a demotion for Kellogg, who has been criticized for his zany analogies and for referring to the “pill,” “rock,” “pumpkin,” etc., but rarely “basketball.”

3 For Capital Region fans frustrated at times by selections of local NFL telecasts, be glad you’re not in Orlando. The TV station there put up a notice Sunday essentially apologizing for NFL rules requiring it to show all Jaguars road games. Those fans were deprived of the heavily promoted “Manning Bowl” game between the Broncos and Giants. It could be worse. What if those Orlando fans lived in Jacksonville?